Popping the Bubble: Exploring SimCity World

Aug 21, 2012

Meghan McDowell

Hi everyone! My name is Meghan McDowell and I’m a producer on SimCity. I’ve worked at Maxis for eight years and I’m really pleased to be part of the new SimCity. Part of my role here at the studio is to shape the newly announced SimCity World feature.

If you didn’t have a chance to watch our Gamescom trailer explaining the feature, you can see it below.

As you can see, SimCity World is a collection of features that enhance a player’s game experience by connecting them with one another. Through Challenges, Leaderboards, and the Global Market, SimCity World lets Mayors shape their cities’ stories in different ways, connect and engage with each other, and contribute to a global SimCity community. We built the SimCity World features as a way to surface that interconnected world to the player and show them how their gameplay can be complemented by being a part of it.

Part of our way of doing that is through CityLog, the tool that allows players to connect, notify, and act on events in SimCity. CityLog will do a lot of things. It’ll allow you to see if your friends have founded new cities in regions that you can join. Or tell you that your friends have passed you on a leaderboard. If there’s a challenge going on in a region, it’ll show you your progress. It’ll even message any Global Market changes you may want to take advantage of. Lastly, it’ll let you know about any Achievements your friends are earning in case you want to strive to achieve the same ones. All of the messages you see in CityLog have an action you can take. You don’t have to act, but if you are looking for new and interesting ways to play (or just want to keep tabs on what your friends are doing), CityLog can help keep you up-to-date.

One of the new ways to play is through our regular challenges. Some of these challenges will be cooperative, where the entire world of SimCity can collaborate to reach a common goal. Other challenges are competitive, where regions compete against each other and vie to win exclusive rewards. Challenges are completely optional, but are a great way to prove to the world what kind of Mayor you are. They take strategy and coordination to succeed at. You can work alone, with your region, or with the entire community to complete them.

To coincide with challenges we also have leaderboards. There are many different types of leaderboards in the game and they encourage you to compete or simply to see how you compare to the rest of the Mayors in SimCity. They range from traditional leaderboards like biggest population, more deviant boards like biggest polluters, and competitive leaderboards like most profitable Casino City. You can compare yourself to the global SimCity community or to your friends. Right now, I’m gunning for the top of the crime leaderboards in the studio. I’m quite the lawless Mayor!

The Global Market makes up the last piece of SimCity World, and it is here where goods and resources can be bought and sold. The market will be moving depending on how our players are playing. Players can affect the Global Market by how they play. So if oil prices are up, players may decide to invest in oil drilling in their city so that they can profit from it by selling the goods to other players.

I’ll let our Lead Designer Stone Librande go into detail about how The Global Market works in his blog post coming up this Friday on SimCity Insider. Before I go, though, I just wanted to say I’m having a lot of fun playing SimCity and every day something fun, unexpected, and amazing goes on in the game. I’m excited for all of you to get it in your hands on it. See you on the leaderboard!